Gloria Chappell, 42, lives with her husband and three children in a neat west London estate known locally as “the new Brookside” for its resemblance to that well-known television close. Inside her snug living room, among the reproduction prints of a bucolic English past, a parallel world is reflected. There’s a blown-up holiday photograph of Gloria and her relatives under palm trees on the edge of a beach in Grenada, picnicking out of the back of a Land Rover, looking relaxed and happy. Youngest son Allen is just out of the frame, picking sea grapes. There’s a map of Grenada, and an engraving from Ghana showing two women pounding grain.

Gloria, who came to England at 12, has always brought up her sons with an awareness of their Afro-Caribbean heritage. Now, like increasing numbers of concerned black parents, she is considering sending 13-year-old Allen back to the island she came from - for the sake of his education.

Problems in the education of Afro-Caribbean children - reflected at their worst in the disproportionately high rate of exclusions of black boys from school - are keenly felt by their parents. Some of the current generation of parents, often brought up and educated in the West Indies themselves, are seeing the dream of a better life for their children evaporate before their eyes as their children fail at school.

In response, some decide to send the children back home. “Whenever you get a group of us together,” says one middle-class black mother, “it’s one of the first things we talk about. All of our friends have contemplated sending their kids home. We’re giving the oldest a year in secondary school, to see how she does. But we are thinking of sending them home. For us, it’s a real option. ”

There is a supreme irony in this, not lost on Claire Villaruel, chair of the African Caribbean Governors group in west London. A former teacher and now a schools counsellor, Mrs Villaruel had a convent education in Trinidad before training as a teacher in the United States. Her son, now grown up, went to private schools in England.

“West Indian parents come here with the notion that England has the best education system in the world. That is because most of our island scholars were sent to England and they came back with degrees. What we didn’t realise was that you did have a second-class type of education operating at state level. And we got chucked into that.”

But the problem for worried parents is not so much the overall quality of the education in British state schools but the specific treatment meted out to black children in the system. There are widespread fears among Afro-Caribbean parents that their children are stereotyped, that white teachers expect them to be “good at games but not at Latin”, as Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, puts it. Many feel that the Caribbean culture is too readily interpreted as aggressive or unco-operative.

Black parents The TES spoke to expressed grave concern over the need for their children to do as well and better than their white peers to compete in the job market, combined with deep-rooted doubts that their children can be well understood and supported in white-dominated schools. “I feel when I go into a school that I can no longer be my West Indian self,” says Gloria Chappell.

“I have to become something else because I feel I’ll be judged, or my child’s lack of progress will be judged, on how his mother speaks. I feel that an opinion is already being made about my child, based on how I carry myself, and that it’s all to do with stereotyping.”

“Whatever school our children go to,” says one Jamaican mother, “they’re not pushed. Our parents drummed it into us that education was really important, and we know that they have to be 10 times better and study that much harder. We left school with really good qualifications and still found it very hard to get jobs. We stay up with our children to do the homework. We’re teachers here at 6.30pm every night.”

While the concerns expressed by black parents may in many ways mirror the concerns of any parents whose children attend hard-pressed inner city schools, Diane Abbott says the range of options open to black parents is more limited. “Black communities tend to be in decaying areas, with all the problems of old and run-down schools. But going to the suburbs isn’t an option for us either, because there it tends to be all-white schools. And people don’t want their children to be a minority at private schools.”

Gloria Chappell is deeply concerned about her youngest son. He did well in primary school, but his secondary reports are poor and he has been in trouble for bad behaviour.

Mrs Chappell does not draw the simplistic conclusion that her son’s problems are entirely due to white racism. Her oldest son did well at school here and is now studying politics at university. But she does fear that difficult adolescent behaviour will be less well-tolerated in black children than it is in children from other ethnic backgrounds. “I want to ask - ‘do you like my son? Or do you have a problem with black children?’ But I’m not able to voice my deep fears at the school because I would be perceived as someone who’s got a chip on her shoulder?” Mrs Chappell has given her son until Easter to show consistent improvement at school. If it doesn’t materialise, he will go to Grenada to live with her mother and attend a church secondary school.

But 95 per cent of the current generation of schoolchildren of Caribbean origin are, like Allen, born in Britain. For them, going back to the Caribbean represents not “going home” but going to their parents’ or grandparents’ homes.

Allen has enjoyed his holidays in Grenada, but is not at all keen on the prospect. He perches on the edge of the couch, every inch the London teenager, and points out in monosyllables that all his friends are here, and that in Grenada “they’re too strict. They beat you”.

Gloria Chappell admits that life in Grenada would be difficult for him. “Home is hard,” she says. “My mother will expect him to sweep the yard and do chores, whereas I have great difficulty getting him to make his bed. And he’ll have to fight to get on the buses. But it’s not a punishment. At home, children are talking about subjects. They’re trying and achieving, even if some of them haven’t got shoes on their feet. They are not drop-outs.”

Gloria Chappell’s middle son, who went to study for vocational qualifications in Grenada at 16, has good memories of his time there. His London accent was a source of fascination and he was known not by his name, Robert, but by the nickname “English”. He came back with “increased self-confidence and more determination to make a go of things”, says his mother.

Lorna Bryan and Peter Hamilton decided early on that their two children would be educated in Jamaica, where Peter was born. Rachel, now 8, and Philip, 7, have been there for more than three years already, at a private school in Kingston. Lorna Bryan hasn’t looked back.

“They’re getting on wonderfully,” she says. “The reports are just glowing. They’re doing Spanish, computers, a whole range of things. I’ve got friends and cousins here with children the same age and they’re just drawing silly little pictures. They don’t know how to do proper scripting or anything.”

British pupils who study in the Caribbean - many of whom are entitled to dual nationality - can re-enter further education here. Secondary pupils in 16 of the Caribbean territories sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate of the Caribbean Examination Council; the examinations are the academic equivalent of GCSEs and recognised by schools and colleges in Britain, Canada and the United States.

Subjects are broadly similar to those taken in Britain, but with an emphasis on Caribbean history and culture. “We were mandated to develop a syllabus relevant to the Caribbean,” says Irene Walter, acting registrar for the Caribbean Examination Council. “Where possible we assume that children learn best through starting from the environment where they live.”

She says it is now rare for children to be sent from the Caribbean to the UK for their education. “The reports are they do not do as well there.”

But sending children back to the West Indies does not come cheap. The private schools favoured by many ex-patriate parents are cheaper than their British equivalents, but at Pounds 200 per month, per child, for board and lodging with a “guardian”, plus Pounds 130 school fees each term for each child (with all books and extras on top) it’s a substantial financial commitment for Lorna Bryan and Peter Hamilton. And this excludes the twice or thrice-yearly visits the family make to each other, with the children coming back to London each summer and their parents visiting them in Jamaica at Christmas and Easter.

State education in Jamaica, free since 1974, is available to any child with citizenship, although the government has introduced “cost-sharing”, with parental contributions determined through means testing.

The burden for Lorna Bryan is both financial and emotional. “In the beginning, I cried a lot,” she admits. “I still cry sometimes if I talk to Rachel and she sounds a bit sad or something.

“But it’s a sacrifice I’ve decided to make. I know I’m not going to leave a lot of money and wealth to my children so I have to leave them the next best thing, which is a sound education.”

The parents have attracted criticism from friends and relatives, for sending the children away. But Lorna Bryan defends her decision. “It wasn’t a matter of saying education first, and no love,” she says. “It’s out of love that they’re there.”

And the children, according to their mother, like the arrangement. After Rachel’s visit to London last summer, she said she preferred life in Jamaica.

“When she left she took all her things - her cup, plate, knife and fork - and said she wouldn’t be back. She was away from her friends and she didn’t like being indoors all the time.”

But the question of who will care for the children puts a brake on some parents’ plans. Many do not have grandparents in the West Indies. “I wouldn’t send Allen to some long-lost aunt,” says Gloria Chappell. “Some people do, maybe it’s a measure of how desperate they are.”

The combined difficulties of the expense and lack of close relatives in the Caribbean undoubtedly deter many parents from sending their children back home. For parents like Gloria Chappell, it’s a last resort rather than a freely-made choice. “If the work was being produced here, I would not have thought about it. Because it is best for him to be here with the family. And half the facilities he has access to, he wouldn’t have at home. But he still doesn’t appreciate how important education is to a black child in Britain.

“Sending him back is a parent’s desperate effort to find a way of motivating my son. Then I can say to him I’ve pursued all the avenues open to me.”